


Tell Me You'll Wait For Me.

by Zigzagwanderer



Series: Love is a Journey, not a Destination [3]
Category: Hannibal (TV)
Genre: Angst, Dogs, First Time, Fluff, Hannibal Loves Will, Introspection, Jealousy, Original Character(s), Post-Fall (Hannibal), Pseudonyms, References to Illness, Reunions, Smut, Will Loves Hannibal
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-03-08
Updated: 2018-04-18
Packaged: 2019-03-28 04:22:27
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 7
Words: 12,913
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13896153
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zigzagwanderer/pseuds/Zigzagwanderer
Summary: Comes right after 'Somewhere between Waking and Sleeping'. Will has chosen Hannibal, and goes across the ocean to claim him. But after driving Hannibal away after the Fall, what will their reunion be like?





	1. Chapter 1

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Comes right after 'Somewhere between Waking and Sleeping'. Will has chosen Hannibal, and goes across the ocean to claim him. But after driving Hannibal away after the Fall, what will their reunion be like?

The North Atlantic is a scold. 

A fucking harpy bitch. 

She seeks out Will's shortcomings and spits them back at him with salt-spray scorn. She scrapes at his tender keel. She plucks at his newly-tied lines, waiting for them to fail, while she rocks her familiars, her terns and black-capped gulls, backwards and forwards on her endless lap. Even when she allows Will below deck, to sink into something too sepulchral to be called sleep, still she snarls at him from beyond the bulkhead, furrowing the whale-grey sheets of her fathomless bed.  


But, for Will, this is a relief. To be mindless, to be unmanned; to only have to survive her, instead of what the very thought of Hannibal does to him, is a respite. To be worked until he can only collapse, bruised and shaken, onto his narrow coffin of a bunk, is the only way to stop himself from noticing how vast it is, how filled it is with a shape that is not there, and that he cannot put his arms around.  


Despite the pain, despite the peril, despite the witching of a few of his hairs to white, Will is voyaging now. He has, at last, momentum.  


And he has a key; a key that was hidden in a hole, in a well, in a desert. Unmarked. Unremarkable. It could unlock anywhere.  
He wears it chained around his neck, safe from brine or bitch. It has a fob attached. A fetish. It is a bit of bone, perhaps, drilled through and attached to the key with a twist of silver wire. A macabre trinket for a key to No Where, one might suppose.  
But Will has hunted, and Will knows antler when he sees it. And he has always been good with maps. So Will has given up on waiting for a god-damned invitation, possibly one written in someone else's blood, and he has pointed the great serpent of his desire, his adoration, his sweet, lover's wrath, towards a curving branch of forgotten islands. 

The Sarvia Archipelago. The Place of the Broken Antlers.  


And so the weeks pass.  


The harpy bitch keeps Will true to her, she keeps him duteous and frigid, right up until the morning that the coastal fog is speared through with jostling, Norwegian pines, with close-slotted houses painted in the colours of a staid and economical rainbow, with an immortally old mariner on a pier, who shoulders a fishing net and waves down through the ages at the beautiful, battered boat gliding by.  


In the crowded, commercial Skaggerak, the ocean lets him go. By the time he has been bullied by ferries through the Great Belt, Will belongs once more to the world of men and monsters.  


Or, in truth, he belongs to one man, one monster.  


Will has finally found his way home.


	2. Chapter 2

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will has arrived at the archipelago

And now he has been on Vakkrehejm for four days. Alone. Such days linger forever, this close to the icy crown of the world.  


Will has been mending a cabinet door, outside, in the unending Baltic gloaming. The clouds are reflected brown and a rising red. Sawdust and blood spice the cooling air. The gutted trout will sleep, blind, in salt, away from the otters who watch from under the boardwalk.  


He resumes his work on the broken hinge. He is dogged, he has an animal need to contribute to what Hannibal has been building here, even if Hannibal himself is absent, even if Hannibal himself is entirely unaware of Thomas Buckley's navigation back into his life.  
Thus, he is catching more fish than he can eat. Hammering boards back into place on the wind-beaten sauna. Raking over loam. Dragging and stacking driftwood from their beach, deadwood from their grove. Tending, tending, tending.  


It helps. With Hannibal fighting for his _life_ out there, or at least his freedom as a fugitive, somewhere where Will cannot reach him, it helps.  


For tales are being told now of the spiralling troubles inland. Rumours are swirling through the lagoons, carried to incomer Thom by dour fishermen who mime extravagant atrocities. The voices in the static crackle about unrest, of disorder charging like a bloodied boar along the old tracks of yet older dominions. He cannot find that the news agencies care much about so small a conflict, but local proclamations reek of weary perturbation; they are reporting memories, repeating fables, for what is history if not full of hooded warlords, of plagued elderships put to the fire, of intellect and innocence lost again and again to the dark necromancies of politics and poverty?  


Facts are not escaping the ancient, unkind forests, but he fears that screams soon might be. He fears that Hannibal might not.  


He has just stripped off a moss-coloured sweater that he found in a drawer. The fine wool is so lamentably stuck with burrs now, so pungent with dead leaves and fish-scales, that it might never be fit to be returned to its rightful owner. He swallows, and crushes the soft green of it into his fists. At that moment, he can think of nothing he wants more than to be chided for such carelessness.  


He turns, half-naked, from the long knife-edge of the evening breeze. He is waiting for something, anything, while outwardly listening to the thrushes gossip from the scrub by the boathouse. Will scoots an insect from the sweat on his scarred shoulder. He lifts an eyebrow.  


Wait until Hannibal comes home, he warns the birds. Wait until he returns to me. Then you'll have something to be scandalized about.  


He knows that it is bravado, quilted together from the rags of courage and concern, but he has found that saying it out loud, helps. Touching his body, in that inexorable, hungry way Hannibal did, back in the desert, helps. Fixing the intricate frame of the cabinet door, with fingers that have been roughened by rigging, helps. 

He breathes in the blood and the ever-present salt and the perfume of the cut wood. He breathes in and it is exactly how Hannibal tasted that night, how it tasted when he bit down, in that small oasis of a hideaway, leaving stains to share between their lips. He strokes away his rising anxiety, strokes away shavings from the curving wood. He warms a little walnut oil between his fingers before easing it deep into the greedy grain.  


He is unable to believe that what he promised the thrushes will not come true.  


He drips more oil from the smoked-glass bottle. He took it from an artist's box of pigments and primers, choosing it over the more prosaic can of linseed on his side of the spacious workshop. He feels full of shy entitlement. He has grinned more, and more foolishly, at the intimacy of his tools keeping company with Hannibal's slender, sable brushes, than he has at anything else since he arrived, even the master bedroom.  


And that itself is a _wonderment_ ; such a thing should not exist, according to the opinions of the world, and yet, here, it seems to be. He keeps trying to fix the ordinary miracle of it in his mind, on his tongue; their bedroom. Their bed.  


He has never cared much for symmetry before, a being of internal chaos such as he is, but now the paired tallboys, the twin reading lamps, the twofold sets of crimson pillows seem universally right, the emotional double-helix that Will has waited his entire life to be a part of. Hannibal has been living here, without him, but in hope. In expectation, even.  


And now Will is here, but he cannot thrive, cannot settle, cannot be a whole.  
The strangeness of that first, agonising night in the empty house has yet to fade.  


He remembers; whistling forlornly for a dog that was never his. Trailing through the alien tangle of trees at the tip of the island, certain that Hannibal would be there, but rotten and eyeless, taunting Will's relentless indecision from the end of a knotted belt. A Japanese figurine in the dining room mocked him with porcelain contempt; Poor Thomas Buckley, sailing across the ocean to join a husband who is no more real than he is. He remembers how it felt to cave her face in, reminded of someone who had meant much to Hannibal before he did.  
He can hardly forget how he broke the door off an original Beidermeier cabinet, to get at whatever the hell fancy decanters were inside.  


Exhaustion hobbled heartbreak, in the end, that first night. And whiskey that was probably distilled before he was born. Midnight came to set the sun, and the horizon spilled the dregs of its golden liquor down the black gullet of the archipelagic sea.  


Five hours later, there was a groggy dawn. Will had waded straight out. Washed away the sourness and self-pity.  
Remembered who he was, a lifetime ago; an investigator.  
Remembered who he wanted to be from then on; a man fit for a monster.  


So, he had rewound and replayed it. The white house made of wood; a home, clearly not abandoned, simply put on ice. The ichimatsu doll had been posed inside an origami sampan centrepiece. The kind of prissy shit only some pretentious prick would have on their dining room table.  
Will recalls his grim smile.  
The Hannibal who decorated and disguised his meat that way is not Eirik Buckley, retired commercial artist, come to Sarvia to sketch away his declining years. The dolly has a message, then. In the shared dialect of their dead past. For Will to see, should he pass by.  
The paper ship, unfolded, is a letter. To Hannibal. Two short strings of characters, dashing across unclean paper. Frail, yet commanding. The name of a place is printed. 

A would-be war-zone. 

Will cannot read Japanese, but he knows what has drawn Hannibal away from their island. Or rather, who has summoned Hannibal forth, to some insurgent interior.  


Chiyoh. In a new life. Mercenary or martyr. Either way, Will hates her for it. For she has invited his monster into hell.  


A stag is barking to the north-east. The sound is a raw ache in the dusk.  


Will grips the wood he has only just painstakingly joined together, hard. His patchwork calm is splintering with anticipatory loss. He cares not if Hannibal's pseudo-sister sickens, if she is hostage, if she merely wants to reminisce, in the middle of a civil war.  


Thom just wants Eirik to come home.  


He puts the cabinet door back on the workbench to cure. 

The shadows are full of predators and winged ghosts, scenting spilled blood. Will leaves them to fight over the fins and entrails and wanders over to haunt the jetty. Clouds have flooded his world completely, and his skin is raw from the cold, but still, he haunts the god-damned jetty. He could say that he must learn the water. The textures and colours of it. How it moves between the outermost skerries, pulling over stones or silts or depths, but there is no-one left he has to convince with such bullshit.  


Will is keeping vigil over the western approach and that is fucking that.  


Of course, Hannibal comes back to Vakkrehejm from the south.  


The sandpipers whistle an alarm in the half-light, rising from the reed-beds some islets over, then closer again, then on the hump of rock across from theirs. A chain of disturbance.  


Will turns, slowly, drowning in the rush and drag of time and the shallow song of the sills. He takes the slap of the wind full on his damaged cheek. It doesn't matter. He has to weave his way, straining to see now, through the garden, crushing things beneath his boots that he spent the afternoon cultivating. He skirts the corner of the house, wondering vaguely if he should go in and find one of the guns. 

On the shale terraces he jumps and stumbles. Jumps again.  


He has to stop himself from running now. His pulse is competing with the quicker flow of the sea on this side. There are no lights out on the water. No beat or stink of a motor. He rubs at his glasses. Something is moving towards his island. Silently.  


Will reckons frantically the sheer strength it would take to row, single-handed, across the undertows from this direction. To drive a small boat against the wishes and whims of the southern straits. And there are hidden hazards. Innumerable scattershot pieces of the archipelago that jut out of the teeming, crossing currents; it is a broken antler that Odin left there, after all.  


Will pauses, aghast at how easily his hopes have been hoisted by what is likely a bobbing tree-trunk, the disintegrating carcase of a lost whale. For one single lap of the waves, Will thinks; I am wrong. I am dreaming of him. I am going insane with lovesickness and longing.  


Then, in the swift seconds that follow, that will always be able to follow now, gladly, from that moment on, Will understands that Hannibal is dragging himself, in a low skiff that skims the biting teeth of the water, homeward. From the south. The harder way.  


Always, with Hannibal, the infinitely harder way.


	3. Chapter 3

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Hannibal returns to Vakkrehejm.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Are writers allowed to have favourite chapters??

The skiff bludgeons its way out of the channel. It ploughs up through the shingle. It stops dead, felled by Vakkrehejm itself. 

The water all around is rough, like ore. It is grey and muddy and veined through with different purities of silver.

The spray is a thousand needles on Will's skin. He is standing above the small cove, with his arms by his sides.

The hulking figure in the skiff has yet to salute him, acknowledge him. It is heaving, bowed over into the black belly of the hull. Will can hear it panting. Ripping the air from the grim, ungenerous sky into its massive chest. The stern is covered with a stained tarpaulin, and one of the oars has a shattered shaft; it looks more like a weapon than a scull. 

The creature inside eventually rises, looming up into the twilight, a giant with shoulders that span the beam. It staggers out of the skiff. Claws up the bank and onto the wind-scythed grass. It retches. Hacks. Spits.

Will cannot speak. His hands do not reach out. He has never seen anything in his life that appeared to need his assistance less.

The figure makes its loping way across the lawn and sheds one of its skins on the forecourt. It stamps up the steps without pause, knocking over pots of bay and thyme. Then, in the shadow of the portico, it turns ponderously and gazes back down. The outline of the beast against the white woodwork is little diminished by the loss of its outer hide. There is not even a glitter to its eyes. Will shivers. He thinks that it will call out to him, and wonders if he will go.

But the word which is shouted into the cross-wind is not his name. 

Not Will. Not Thom. Not Kai.  
It is not even a voice that Will recognises. It is a harsh sound, from a martial vocabulary. And, even before the last gutturals have finished pricking at Will's spine, a nightmarish version of a dog has crawled out from the boat. Its breath phosphoresces in the gloom. In one obedient stretch it has cleared the incline up from the cobbles and is ambling massively towards its master. It fills the veranda.

The things disappear together into Will's house.

Night arrives.  
It has crept up quite suddenly, in the end. There is poison on the surging wind, the kind of stormy toxin that makes men feel elemental, that makes them uncivilised. Will has gooseflesh all over him. He is terrifyingly alive. He walks lightly now, as if new-winged, across the beleaguered turf. Passes the matted fur cloak, a stinking dead thing on the tidy paving. At the doorway, the bruised herbsong rises to intoxicate him, potent and bitter. The pump of lymph and adrenaline and the serums of arousal are blending and spiking in his body. The brackish turbulence boiling around him is a huge hand at his back. It pushes him to go on in.

As if he needed encouragement.

He turns the corner into the subtly-lit kitchen.  
The man and the dog are slobbering up water. The dog pisses against a cupboard and thumps down in a mound. The place is heavy with the raw scent of them.

Hannibal. Will repeats it to himself. It is Hannibal.

He moves right up next to him. He cannot look away. The glory of a cheekbone, gashed once, twice across its ridge, rosy with congealed blood. The hot amber glaring out of a purpled socket. Dirt fouling the hairline, the hair itself twisted cruelly up into a knot at the back. 

His neck, his neck, his neck.

Will is enraptured. His fingertips graze his own thighs. He wants to touch it all.

Hannibal peels off layer after layer of ragged, filthy cloth. Leaves it without ceremony where it falls. He slops water over his head, again and again and again, until it is sluicing off his lean body, flooding over everything. Will thinks it is for the value of the sensation alone; it will take more than water to clean away the grime, the blood, the stench. 

The thin cotton underwear is peeled off. It slaps wetly onto the slate floor. Will can immediately smell the musk of Hannibal's unwashed cock. Hannibal swills out his mouth. Stands, braced, silent, under the paltry vanity lights that shine so prettily on all those many different wineglasses. 

On things that can break easily.

His shoulders are glossy with exertion, the muscles pronounced. There is a laceration like a crescent on his back that is mending badly, the stitches misplaced and uneven, and Will supposes, self-administered.

"Hannibal." Will whispers.  
There is nothing. There is only the downcast gleaming where recognition should be. Will closes his eyes. He sees flashes of terrible truths. Acts demanded by war and self-preservation. Disease and combat and blame, ringing-around-the-maypole together. Cold nights in places where betrayal has burnt out hope.  
Capture and torture.

The consequences of starvation.

And, lancing through all the fury and the fear, evasion. Escape. At any cost, Hannibal's aim for all these brutal weeks has been to return to the island, and what may or may not be there, waiting for him. Will shakes his head, once. Stops the torrent. Some of it might be from exhumed memories. Some of it might be from yesterday.  
Hannibal radiates agony, and it is not his alone. The monster has survived it all, but he cannot survive Will knowing how he did so. Not this time.

"Hannibal."  
Will puts his hand against Hannibal's arm, pushes gently to turn him.  
Hannibal throws him off. The merest of shrugs.  
Will slams into the sideboard, crockery complaining.  
Hannibal grunts and goes off into the larder. Returns with a haunch. Smacks the back door open and throws it out into the lawn, where the great hound leaps and snatches at it with a satisfied snap.  
When he turns back, Will is standing directly in his way.  
Uncomprehending, Hannibal stares at Will, who is staring right back. 

They are both altered by their time apart. Permanently. Transitorily. Like the water around them, which is always the same, but never the same. It never changes, but it always does.

"Hannibal."  
As soon as he arrived, Will cut off his hair. It was too ruined by gales, by saline, and just once, by a stranger's touch, to be redeemable. It is stubble now, and he has taken to shaving cleanly by way of disguise, marred cheek be damned.  
So, all of his reflections tell him he is frail. Gaunt from sea-rations, in borrowed sweaters that are too big for him. His eyes are the blue of the sky in old paintings; the patina on them is of pain. Thom Buckley appears like a penitent, brittle of mind and fragile of body, in the million aquamarine mirrors around him. 

But reflections are now no more the truth of Will than is the false persona on his passport.

Hannibal healed him, in an ocean of dust. The harpy bitch made him whip-strong, and scoured his mind with salt winds. And Will has a design for himself these days, for what will come next.

He desires to be mated. For life.

He pushes Hannibal back.  
The monster growls. It god-damn _growls_ at Will.  
It tries to move past him, every gesture all about power and nothing at all about grace. Will shoves again, a firm pressure, guiding Hannibal backwards. He is careful not to press on what appear to be cigar-burns on the tanned wingspan of Hannibal's collar-bones, but not too careful.  
"You can't run from me again." Will's voice is low, shaking. He cannot pretend that he is not afraid. "I won't let you."  
He closes in, drives Hannibal to either lean up against the bannister, or fight him. He can deal with either outcome. "I am so done with us running. Unless it's together."  
There is a predacious glint then, one wolf to another, a vision of a wild hunt, shared quarry. But it is a reflex, nothing more. It is not a promise, not a vow. And that familiar light drowns out in Hannibal's eyes as swiftly as it came. He looks at Will without interest. He doesn't move or speak.

Almost chest to chest, Will begins to doubt. The back door blows wide, in a sudden huff of arctic breath, and he turns his head to where the innumerable flows beckon. He pictures his boat. He has learnt the tides here, if nothing else. He could leave this second, for good.  
He is pretty fucking sure he won't be stopped. 

But then, _then_ , there is a hand. Grained with dirt. Wet. Torn about the knuckles. It comes up towards Will and grips him awkwardly.  
Mastoid, maxilla, mandible. Hannibal's fingers hook and splay across Will's welted face.  
It is too tight a grip; it is how the raptor holds the prey. It is too tight a grip, because the muscles have no memory of how to meaningfully caress.  
There are indrawn breaths from both of them at the contact. Relief reignites Will as if he were the sawdust still clinging to his clothes. He closes his eyes to keep the spark of that single rough touch firing for as long as possible. 

When he is an old man he will dream of it before he dies.

He is too far away. He shuffles his boots next to bare feet. Opens his eyes. Leans forward and puts his mouth on Hannibal's. His hands claim Hannibal's waist, he digs his nails in, and then Hannibal pulls Will in to him by the skull and the smouldering is licked into flame.

Hannibal is clumsy. Will is haphazard. 

They crash about, clutching and stroking, uncovering Will and rubbing each other randomly, knocking elbows and hip-bones, until Will is sat on the steps leading to the first floor, as naked as Hannibal. They are all shiver and fever. Hannibal falls on top of Will and they pant into one another. Hannibal smells of salt and smoke and shit.  
Will makes Hannibal open his lips. He sucks. Thrusts inside. He wants every last drop of dirty saliva. He wants to help himself to the shreds of meat in his monster's teeth.  
"Oh my fucking darling, my fucking God," Will babbles as Hannibal scrapes cracked nails over Will's shorn scalp, laps behind his ears. Bites. His exhalations are lava, sliding and solidifying along the pathways of Will's nerves. "You're all I want."  
He gifts Hannibal his throat. Hannibal flicks his long, hot tongue underneath Will's jawline, tracing the vulnerable arrowhead of skin there. Will scrabbles at the rug with his heels. It is the best kind of ordeal. He rakes Hannibal's hair out from its tangle and tugs on it. Hannibal makes a little snarling sound and if Will was hard before, he is _hurting_ now.

He chases more monstrous harmonies. Ruthlessly thumbs Hannibal's nipples. Knuckles between Hannibal's bruised ribs and down to his belly until he reopens a wound somewhere and feels blood between them. It smears from the cut. Hannibal's skin is greasy with old sweat and new, it is winey and sharp and now further slickened with red.

"Want you. Always wanted you." Will cannot get his head down to taste it all but he tries to anyway until Hannibal forces him back against the risers, gasping.  
He spreads Will's legs with a wide palm on each of Will's knees and leans back too. Will gazes at Hannibal. At the crouching demon in the neat stairwell, under the tasteful Elias Martin watercolour. Grimy sinews strung taut to balance, all coiled intent.  
Will gloats; this is mine, this has always been mine. He sees Hannibal's arms, flexed, the gorgeous torsion of the meat. He sees Hannibal's parted thighs, sticky and architectural.  
They groan at the same time as they look down between them. Will is salivating at the sight of their bodies together. He is like an animal. Hannibal tilts Will an unpractised smile. He takes one of Will's hands and runs it up and down his length, then Will's. Will curses and praises in languages he doesn't know. He is shuddering with stupid, blinding joy.

Then Hannibal curls over and starts licking Will's groin, where Will has his fist around himself. Hannibal's beard is full of thorns. If last time was about Hannibal savouring Will, if it was about sampling all the flavourful nuances of Will's flesh, if it was about relish and pleasure, then this time it is all about consumption. It is all about Hannibal devouring Will as if he will certainly perish without him.

Will arches against the staircase. Cracks the back of his head on the edge.  
Again. Again. He ruts into an infernal heat.  
Hannibal gulps him down rhythmically, hungrily; the music of it is grotesque, it is symphonic. Will laces both hands into the gritty mess of Hannibal's hair, yanking in tiny, tight pulls. 

He swells. Puckers. Liquifies. 

He inches his feet on top of Hannibal's, digging his toes into the thin skin there, so that they are a plexus of wishboned limbs, entwined tendons, scissoring joints. One juddering, slippery creature. Instinctual. Voracious. Complete.  
Then his monster uses its teeth and Will is suddenly hoarse from shouting. He pours himself down Hannibal's throat, giving the very marrow of himself to feed the other. Hannibal swallows and feasts.  
Then Will, unseeing but entirely sensate, his skin now his eyes, his heart now his fingertips, reaches out, and feels Hannibal dissolve too, scalding and oily, running down the inside of their legs, seeping into the steps.  
A libation on the wood of their home. A stain he won't even try to scrub out. The little white house on the island is sulphurous and sweet with their shared scent; it is elevated, it is annointed at last.

Hannibal unravels himself from Will and slumps inelegantly against the wall. His breathing stutters. His hand has crept forward to touch his own sternum, carefully. Will sits on the floor. He wants to hold Hannibal, but there is no behavioural model he knows for how to do this.  
Helplessly, he watches Hannibal recover enough to haul himself onto his feet. He is staggering, coughing. He is bloody. He is adorned with bruises like blooms of lichen, yellow and grey.

"Please." Will turns as Hannibal uses the hand-railing to clamber over him and ascend the stairs into the unlit floor above.  
_If we run, we run together._  
Hannibal does not reply. To what Will has said aloud and what he has not.  
Hannibal stumbles heavily into a room somewhere along the upstairs corridor and shuts a door behind himself.  
Will scrambles up a step or two after him, then stops. There are surreally domestic noises from above. Floorboards. More doors. Plumbing. Bedsprings. Then nothing.  
Will thinks about damaged animals. The traumatised. The misused. The beaten. He has cared for many of them over the years. Too many. He remembers what they need. What they don't need.

He gets up, slowly. The hall lamp is knocked over. He rights it.  
The gnawing thing inside him is finally peaceful, pleasured, scales settled, fangs, for now, retracted. It exults, while Will simply tries hard to stop grinning like a god-damned idiot. 

After a while, he can even walk again. 

He picks up a discarded boot. Looks at the blood on the panelling and the bite-marks on himself. Considers the trail of destruction Hannibal has wrought upon his world in the scant hour they have been reunited.  
Will is delighted, sore, concerned, irrevocably in love.  
He glances through the doorway at the greenish moon. Getting dressed can wait. The wrecked kitchen can wait, water and piss and all. 

Will goes out into his shimmering, submarine garden, to say hello to their new dog.


	4. Chapter 4

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The police come to Vakkrehejm.

The archipelago has warbled and wakened with a dawn as rich as rotting fruit, ripe reds and flushing pinks sweetening the blue, until it brightens again and again, and there is honey and blood in the water. 

Will is drinking pine needle tea, and invisible currents rush and flow around his bare head, his bare neck, like spills of some inquisitive, algal liquid. Conn is thundering about after mammoth-bone sticks, allowing Will to check him over little by little in between each delirious new game. Vakkrehejm shakes as each leonine paw strikes the sod.  
He is stubborn, yet responds to command. He has been restrained in his time, punished for non-compliance, but never enough to reduce his efficiency; he is a utility animal, and has been maintained accordingly.  
Will would laugh at the resemblance, if it wasn't so sad.

The police approach.

Conn has eventually suffered Will to examine a small cut on his back. It has been recently sewn up. Impeccably. The surgical precision of the work makes Will look up, immediately, to where the first floor windows remain lidded, to where Hannibal has remained silently laired since he left Will naked in the hallway a dozen hours before.  
There is a sense of crouching, a sense of something horned and winged, gathering strength, away from the lucent day-to-be, behind all those regular, blanked-over orbits. Will expects at any moment to see picked-over bones being vomited from between the shutters. To smell cauldron-messes seeping through the joinery. To taste the smoke from burnt blood as it rises like a ragged sorcery from the chimneys, flowing all too darkly against the wind. 

He trembles, but it is not in fear. He thinks that perhaps their little white house is made of gingerbread after all.

The motor launch sidles up to the quay in textbook order. The livery is recognisable; green is such an honourable colour.  
Will has confined Conn to the fenced corral of the side patio and gone back to replacing roof slates. In a month or so, the ancient breath of the northern bear will come howling and clawing at them, and the world will be rebuilt in white iron. He has been wondering about the feasibility of a turf roof. He would like very much to argue with Hannibal about it, for Hannibal to sigh and resist and be cajoled, and then to soothe Will between kisses; saying, _maybe in the spring, William._

The police arrive.

A man with a stiff-jointed gait walks right up to the house without waiting for any sign of invitation.  
Rude, Will thinks, squinting, an islander by temperament if not by birth. He tosses his work gloves from hand to hand.  
"Uh," he slips into his pseudonym, shedding himself of Will Graham. "Can I help you?"  
"You are?" The English is flawless if not agreeable. A badge is shown.

Will attempts to look a lot more fucking harmless than he feels.  
"I'm Thom, Inspector. Everything ok?" He frowns uncertainly. "I mean, I handed my permits in to that mainland office, like, a week ago."

The man in pristine fatigues is checking over what he can see of Vakkrehejm from where he is standing. He does so _obviously_. He puts his hands on parts of it that are near him; one of the canvas cushions that billow and sail along the bench, a final gentiana bloom, the palm-polished handle of a rake. Then he walks to the glass doors which are opened out from the sitting room into the garden, and peers in through the wavering sorrel of the curtains. Will has tidied away his blanket, from when he stretched out for a few hours on the couch, keeping watch, waiting, worrying, and he has put away the rest of the debris, in the spirit of Hannibal’s good housekeeping. 

But that is not the point.

"No-one is supposed to be here, currently." The man snaps a smile, once, and spreads his arms, proprietarily. This also shows Thom his weapon. "The owner did not confide to me that he had employed a house-sitter? Or maybe you are a tourist who has lost their way among our hundreds of pretty skerries? Huh?"

"Oh. Right." Will shakes his head as if he was still becurled. "I get it. This is just you checking the place over. Great job. But we're fine. See, I'm meant to be living here. I'm Thomas Buckley." Will pauses with his hand spread over his heart. He opens his mouth only to discover his face is heating up. It actually god-damn burns like a newly-wed. Fucking holy shit, Will thinks. Just say it, for fuck's sake.  
"I'm Eirik's husband."

The ospreys two islets over plunge for treasure again.  
The officer watches them, seemingly absorbed in a sight which is not so very unusual, as they bring up flashes of wriggling gold.  
"Oh, yes?" he says.

Thom weaves his arm around the solid crutch of the wooden ladder. "Yeah. Eirik had to come on ahead. I was, I mean we were in an accident, and I was real sick there for a while." Will bites his lip. Looks at the endless teal, looks at one blade of rock that is splitting the endless blue truth only for it to continue again, absorbing the new, crooked ripples back into itself. "And, I was kinda confused about things."  
  
The slash across the temple where a sail batten sliced him is still raw meat; it had too much salt in it for too long. The rest of his face is a history of Will-and-Hannibal. Of their battle against a common enemy, of their battles against one another. But to many people, scars are scars are scars.  
Thom can tell that pale eyes are gauging his depths, scanning him for evidence of Eirik, seeking traces or transference, even though the Inspector is appearing to appraise the box of immaculate tools on the split-log table.

"I see. He has never said anything to me about you."  
The tone is all wrong for an official to use. Thom meditatively picks up a roof tile. There was a stack of them behind the boathouse, but not all are sound. Thom presses a finger against a slab that has split. The sting of it is refreshing. It clarifies.  
The island is so quiet he can hear Conn drinking from his trough of water around the corner.  
"No shit," Will says, very clearly. "Was he supposed to?"  
  
The sea-hawk cries in triumph, fattening before her southern sojourning. A line of bright, dewy red, like a path marked on a map, wells up along Will's finger.  
He straightens up and wipes it on his tongue. He is fiercely happy that he is still wearing Hannibal's sweater. That he is still wearing all of Hannibal on him, even down to the crooked marks of his teeth.

"No." The Inspector does not like what he sees, and he shifts his weight and frowns, appalled at Thom's cadence, or maybe it is his own that so disturbs him. "But you must admit it seems an odd omission." He runs his hands along his belt, taps a knuckle on the holster, then does the same with the radio. He turns to better look up at the house, the open doors of the adored workshop, the closed ones of the seething smokehouse.

The flat weight of the grey mineral balances on both of Will's palms, as if he was holding out a prayer-book with a cracked spine. It is a larger slate than all the others, thicker too. It has power. It laments the ash it once was, before it was bound into solidity by unbearable weights, unbearable heats. He glares at the back of the Inspector's head. 

The blond hair is short. It would be no protection at all.

Then he is all rolling eyes and rueful grin. All sweet Thom again. He even manages to laugh, softly.  
"Look, man, I admit I've had a few...commitment issues? And there's been a lot of hurting along the way."  
He throws the cracked slate into the sack of discards. "But this is it now, yeah? No more separations. Thom and Eirik Buckley. Fresh start for us."

Will thwacks his gloves on the wood. He is unhappy that it is the Inspector who is the recipient of these last words. He kicks the bottom rung of the ladder and the Inspector looks at him like he wishes he could throw him into a cell somewhere.  
Will makes Thom swallow it down. "Listen, appreciate the visit, and when he wakes up I'll be sure and give him hell for keeping me his dirty little secret, yeah?"  
"Eirik has already returned? I am...relieved. That area is very dangerous, these juntas are armed, desperate, it is really no place for...When he informed me where his family business was to take him, I was...concerned."  
  
Will stares right out of sweet Thom now at the policeman's fluttering.  
Thom's face is held tight, as he struggles to hide his scales, the petals of green and black which imbricate beneath his skin. He is surprised that the Inspector doesn't actually recoil from him in alarm, Will is so vast, so beautifully, jealously ophidian, so ready to strike.

"Concerned?" He says slowly. "Then don't be. That's kinda been my job from the day I met him."  
He slides his body around the ladder again, but now he is lissom, not infirm. He is not recovering from the fall, he is gloriously remade by it. "And right now, I think he needs to rest. Kinda got a honeymoon vibe going on now, seeing as I'm all patched up, if you can understand my meaning."  
The policeman is verging on a concealed, confused outrage. "I will need to confirm all of...this," he gestures at Will distastefully, "with the homeowner."

Will knows he has made a mistake. This is new for him, this yearning ferocity, and he has yet to learn how to gentle it. How not to bite, or to bite where it will not be seen by the authorities.  
Right now, Hannibal's demeanour, his wounds, his speechlessness, will demand questions. Reports. Photographs, perhaps, of cuts and bruises. His passport will be examined. Enquiries will be launched. All because the Inspector is apparently so fucking _interested_ in Eirik, he will want to show he cares. 

People do, as Will understands it.

He hisses out a breath and shrugs one shoulder, re-calculating, glancing into the toolkit. At the sparkle of cutting things. "How about I get him to check in with you guys later today, Inspector?"  
"I am afraid that will not do. You understand that trespassing is..."  
"Jesus." Will scratches furiously at his chin. Allows an annoyance he has seen directed at himself, at the bureaucracy of law enforcement in general, case after case, to add impatience to his drawl. "Thought Europe was gonna be a lot more...progressive, yeah? You want documentation?" He raises his voice. "Want to see a legitimate marriage certificate? Bullshit like that? Maybe you'd better come into _our_ house then."

Will's hands do not tremble. He always thought they might, when it came down it. But no. His mind does not scourge itself. He always thought it would, when it came down to it. But no.

Hannibal's priority was to return to Vakkrehejm. Will's is to keep him safely there. These are their first vows, Wills feels.

He hopes there will be others.

Then he hears it. A grating, curtailed bark. 

Not Conn's vast bellow, reminding everyone that he is still Perkunas, beneath his new-found civilian softness. 

Not a stag, warning off Ullr and his fatal bow.

Will looks over at the jetty. The bobbing launch. The Inspector has an entourage. A young girl in uniform is swinging herself onto the boardwalk and is running towards them.  
"Inspector Linna." Her voice is high. She calls out other words. In any language, they are unmistakably warnings. She waves her arms.

Will pulls his gloves back on.

But then she is pointing ahead of her, at a fast-moving object that is barrelling down the steps. It is a tan blur as it careens around the low buckthorn windbreak and then races across the wind-scorched grass, barking in recognition until it eventually tumbles over and into Will.

"He heard you two, uh, talking and ran from me." The girl apologises, catching up, wheezing. Will kneels so that he can take off the crude muzzle. He holds it up wordlessly and the Inspector takes it back.  
"Well, hi there, buddy, how have you been? Miss me?" Will feels a good layer of muscle on what was such a scrawny wretch, back in the desert. He feels the condition of the dog's buttercup coat. He is transformed. He is confident and healthful. He lets the dog sneeze at him, while he casually reads the tag on the impossibly soft, possibly bespoke harness.  
He reads the name again, pushing his glasses back from where their dog has dislodged them, to make sure he's got it right. "Hi there, bud. I sure missed you. Its been so long, buddy."

God-damn _Sandy_? 

"You miss me, Sandy?" He and the dog grin at one another. Sandy tilts his head to one side in an entirely familiar attitude, and Will laughs.  
"That's so sweet. He did miss you, I am sure." The girl in uniform claps her hands now as if she was five years old. "He was a little bit sad but then we got along quite well. I have all of his belongings at the office. All the things Mr Buckley left with us before he was called away. He is a good boy. At first he did not want to eat but then I made up his food in the way that Mr Buckley had typed out for me and then he was such a good boy. I will return his belongings now we know there is someone to look after him on Vakkrehejm."  
  
She pauses then, realising Will is, after all, a stranger. Her smile breaks apart on the flint in Will's eyes. He stands, but before he can muster up the correct words to thank her, to disarm her, the Inspector is striding woodenly towards the corner of the house.

"Mr Buckley's...spouse still has some things to show us, Officer Ekblad. Hopefully, forms of identification that are not canine in origin."

Will looks at the girl. Sees that she has made no effort to inhabit her standard issue clothing. From experience of working with cadets, he knows this indicates her disinterest. This is a stop-gap, a stepping-stone, it pays for cigarettes and beer and a place to live that is not with her family. It is not a calling for her. She does not want ugliness, and to fill in forms categorising that ugliness, making it permanent, making it like ink that rubs off the paper and into her skin.

"Sure. Back door's open." He sees how young she is. "You go on in, Officer."

Sandy is left to caper in sunlight as yellow as his fur.

Will follows them into his house, head down. He cannot help but longingly consider the stairwell, the baptised steps. He waves his guests towards the kitchen, where the tiled floor is so very easy to clean.

Then there is a moment of impact. Of flooding pain. A moment when Will blinks, suddenly washed in ice-cold, and his eyes blur. With visions of innocence and betrayal. With Hannibal, standing there in his memory, immaculate, looking at Will. Holding a knife.  
Will leans sideways slightly, against the edge of the dresser.

Hannibal is standing there. Immaculate. Holding a knife.

He raises an eyebrow at the police, who have trooped in to stand, somewhat awkwardly, between himself and Will.

"Oh, hello, Daniel. Officer Eckblad. I thought I heard human voices amidst all of Sandy's chatter. Thank you once again for minding him at such short notice. I trust he was well-behaved?" Hannibal continues to slice a lemon, silver and acid in the air. "Has my Thomas offered you some tea yet?"

There might be talk, then, between the others. Will is unaware of it. Will is drowning all over again.  
Hannibal is scrubbed to a roseate perfection, burnished and hard-planed, and he has cut and shaved all of the brambled beard away. Will drifts, lost, determined, towards Hannibal, as he did when they were in the sea.  
Hannibal's hair is clipped very short at the sides and falls longer, charmingly uneven, from the top of his head, in a soft clean swoop. He looks ridiculously young, ridiculously boyish. The cuts and the damaged eye appear less severe now. Roguish, even, as he smiles at his foes.  
He is just a boy who likes to scrap, then. To play rough.  
Will cannot breathe. His throat is constricted. Water fills his eyes. He reached out for Hannibal, when they fell, and he does so now.  
Just as seriously. Just as completely, utterly fucking seriously.  
His fingertips seek out and grasp the dove-softness of Hannibal's shirt. Will pulls them together. It was so, in the deep, as they hit the razoring rocks; Hannibal protected him then, forgave him and curled around him and Will wraps his arms around him just like then, and just like then he holds him.  
He holds him.  
He will never, never let go.  
Hannibal's shoulder is blossoming wetly now, beneath the grey cotton, and Will presses himself around Hannibal's side, closely, to hide it.  
He loves the warmth of it. The blood. It is life, to him. His life. Their life. He can smell it, like he did when they fought for the shoreline, every wading stroke almost certain to be their last.  
Hannibal sways a little, as he fits into Will. Because he is fractured, but fighting, always fighting. For them, now.  
Until it ends.  
Because it has been such a long, hard falling.  
Will is elated, he is bone-weary. And as he looks at Hannibal he knows, that just like then, when he stepped them off into nothing, that so long as they die together, it will be everything.  
Hannibal turns his politely enquiring gaze from the police towards Will and his expression becomes a good deal less polite.  


Hannibal disagrees. Hannibal will not be content with their death. He was not content for them to lie, forever, at the foot of the cliffs, and he will not be content for them to submit here, to local law enforcement, with a kettle trilling away in the background.  
Then Will tastes salt, and he closes his eyes. It might be remembrance of the ocean he put them in. It might be sweat from Hannibal, a residual wound-fever. It might be tears.  
The surf continues to move over him. Hannibal's hand continues to move over him, over and over, until it is done.  
Hannibal is courteous. Hannibal extemporises. 

The police are appeased. Disappointed. Seduced.

The police leave.

Sandy and Conn dance up and down on the jetty.

There is quiet in the little white house on Vakkrehejm, for a while, after the noise of the motor launch fades.  
Then, Will reaches his hands around Hannibal and begins to undo the buttons on his ruined shirt.  
He puts his mouth to the red stain and murmurs, "Come to bed."


	5. Chapter 5

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Will and Hannibal...together, alone, unbloodied. Isn't this what they both wanted?

There are fourteen wooden steps up to the first floor; fourteen steps they have not yet taken together. A minefield in wood, both plain and carved. 

Six, two, then six again; couplets enough for an embrace to be sanitised, somehow, into a clinical support. For Hannibal to make Will feel like an orderly, to make him respectful about where he ought to be putting those hot, hungry hands. 

There is a cruel, old, silence; a glass wall, vitrifying between them. Again. 

Will steers them into the big, brilliant room with a backward, tumbling feeling, as if he were about to slide right out of Vakkrehejm and be dragged, widdershins, through the saga of their past skirmishes, through water and trials of the physical and of the spirit, through an arid place of resentment and reparation and then more water until he would be forced to say _please_ all over again.

Will seats Hannibal. On the bed which is their bed, Will reminds himself, beginning a brimming, angry tanka in his head. 

“I am intrigued, Will. Have you changed so much?” Hannibal hides the sharp stresses of his breathing. Folds hands, crosses legs; a repeated refrain. An unwelcome chorus. “If not for my intervention, would you really have killed them both?”

The medicine cabinet is as well-stocked as a field hospital. 

Blinking, Will turns slowly from searching through the boxes and vials. Let Hannibal find his own aspirin, then.

“A kitchen bloodbath does not have to be an inevitability, Hannibal. Did you not eavesdrop on the part where I was going to show your new blond friend our _official paperwork?_ ”

“I am sure that you are aware there is no such contract here, Will.” Hannibal smiles sparingly, evenly, and it is a smile from _before_. “Not amongst all of the documentation I had thought fit to provide. Our noms de guerre could easily be indicative of fraternity, or perhaps cousinship, and I had not presumed…”

“I presumed.” The formal envelope is ripped from Will’s nightstand, chamfering the silver wings of the ribbon-trailing doves. The expensive forgery is shaken out, and the drawer slammed shut. “That much has changed. I’ve earned that right. To presume things about us. Just so you know.” 

Hannibal studies the Buckley’s marriage certificate as if it was a letter from Rimbaud to Verlaine that Will has discovered in some dusty Parisian attic. His mouth moves as if he would like to bend and kiss the treaty their two assumed names have made on the paper. 

Yet Hannibal says nothing.

Will takes a shower, and watches as their reunion rinses away. He returns, flushed and hard, to find that Hannibal has seen to his own suturing, and is writing something out on the desk in the corner.  
Will screws up his damp towel and throws it on the floor. 

“I would row over to Ernesta’s store, on Lindbakk,” Hannibal murmurs, “but it would be inconvenient, to say the least, if I punctured a lung.”  
One arm is curled protectively around his waist, where Will should be, the other hand offers a slip of notepaper.  
A god-damned shopping list. Will is being told to run an errand.

Will shivers. A cold front, from the north, is engaging with the warmer lagoons. Will sees through the balcony window that where the fray is joined, out on the farthest islets, frets are forming. But still Will stands there, simmering, surrendering, wanting to be taken, wanting to be celebrated, wanting a victorious end to a thousand acts of war.

Yet Hannibal does nothing.

The glory of the bedroom Will had thought was theirs does not darken. It simply bleeds out, peacefully, and Will is light-headed with loss.  
And the worst of it is Hannibal’s eyes. Will is not wrong, for they are entirely _savage_. But that pure passion is countermanded. Simplicity of need sacrificed to strategy.  
And it is heart-breaking. And it is bullshit. 

Will dresses silently in khakis and wearily pulls on his boots. The list of sundries goads him from the carved lid of the blanket-box. His eyes sting. He even loves Hannibal’s cursive, for fuck’s sake, but he frowns down at it anyway.  
“This for Sandy and Conn?”  
“Yes, for a few days, whilst I am injured, I am afraid it will be biscuit for Sandy and _Perkunas_.”  
“I _heard_ what you called him.” Will’s voice is hoarse. “Conn is shorter. Better for re-training. And forget this crap. I can make their food. I’ll get what I need and put it on your account.”  
“As you wish.”

Gun-smoke cloud smears across the archipelago. The skittish sunlight has lost. Will farewells the dogs and does not have it in him to order them off the expensive wicker loungers. Somewhere beyond the grey, an artillery of combative pressure booms, and it will strike Vakkrehejm soon. 

An hour ago, Will was hoping that the storm would keep them prisoner for _days_. 

He goes into the boathouse and stares at the blank wall. Then he runs the checks on the dinghy. Then he stops.  
Will had not intended to kill, but it is in him to do so, and if he must, then he must. He has killed before, after all, and there has to be an end to all of this, this dreary disputation, at some point. 

Will thinks, there can be no retreat.  


In truth, there is nowhere left for his heart to go.  
So Will turns and goes back down the path, towards their little white house.


	6. Chapter 6

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Killing Hannibal

Will is standing in the doorway. 

The pyjamas are how Will remembers them from their one night together in the compound, in the desert. They are impossibly inky and fluid upon Hannibal’s body, they drape and skim and obliterate everything else in the clouding pearliness of the bedroom. They eclipse everything else in Will’s sight. He could drown in their dark hollows, mouthing helplessly at the black, until death covers his face.

Only now Hannibal is wearing the pyjama shirt too, pitch-dyed and princely, and although not all of the tiny, horn fastenings are done up, Will is pretty sure he does not have the patience for _any_ of them.

Hannibal stares back. His hair and skin are gold-edged in the intimate swirl of lamplight, like the old, elaborately bound book of Norse myths that he has just picked up. His fine-boned feet are bare, and there are marks on them from Will, red crescents that may not fade. Hannibal's bruises and his eyes and the contours of his face are circles and slants of shadow, and he is something Hadean, something perfectly and obdurately Hadean, in a time when only the self-righteous smugness of saints is allowed.

And he has shouldered that singular sovereignty, alone, for an eternity. Awaiting his consort.

“Will?”

The fog drifts unevenly at the closed window, suspending and releasing the stormlight in blurring handfuls. It is faintly jaundiced, distorting.  


Vakkrehejm has become a liminal place, a place of limbo, where monsters might meet; Will does not feel at this moment that he belongs to the water, nor to the earth. He belongs entirely to Hannibal, yet he has never been so fully himself.

Will sloughs off his rough, mist-wetted outerwear. Casts it down to clot on the white nimbus of the rug. He crawls across the bed, like he crawled across the sea.

“I want us to make love," he says, and there is nothing at all submissive in the way that he kneels. "Now. I want us to be lovers. From now on. But if we do this, then there’s no way back. It’s permanent. It’s you, and me, until the end.”

Will slips off his tattered scarf. He is sweating. Dizzy. His pulse is dashing itself at his skin. It could split him open. He watches Hannibal take in his bared throat. 

“And that guy, that Hannibal from before, the one under siege, the one hiding behind behavioural ciphers, using words as walls, and kindnesses as weapons…that guy dies, right now.”

Will leans forward and _takes_. His fists bloom with black flowers, and the silk between his fingers is how he remembers it; his skin has sorrowed for it, night after night after night. “I've tried to kill him. I've thrown him off a cliff. I've buried him in indifference, under the sand. Because, Hannibal, ” Will says, simply, “I have _never_ been interested in that guy.” 

He lets go. 

The collection of legends is lowered. Not set down.

“So now it’s up to you. Your turn. You kill him, right now, Hannibal, for _us_. You give me the thing that's underneath. The real thing. Or you and him can go to hell.”

And Will wants to cry. 

And to rend.  


And to love. 

Hannibal takes a while to incline his head, but when he does, the gesture is both a proposal and an accord.

And then, _then_ , Will stretches up and kisses him. Not in ire, although Will is furious. Not in desperation, although that is there, too, in all of Will, shaking his scales and pounding through his salty, ravenous ichor.

But no; Will leans forward, and upward, and kisses Hannibal as it might be if they kiss every hour of every day, for the rest of their unholy lives. In passing. After Hannibal serves them up somebody else’s heart. While one reads aloud to the other on warm, daylit midnights.  
It is a shorthand for many ordinary, wondrous things. It is a gladness, that they are here, that they may yet journey on, claws in or claws out. 

Hannibal throws the priceless book away to the side and it knocks his half-filled cup and saucer right off the table and some of the antique pages rip and his tea is spilt. He kisses Will back, and for a long time that is all either seem capable of, just the repetition of something ordinary, and wondrous.

And then they part.

Hannibal goes to tuck Will’s curls aside, then realises there are none. By way of explanation, he checks his own peripheral vision.  
“I should perhaps mention, Will, that I have administered to myself a small dose of morphine.”  
Will raises an eyebrow as he begins to work out the twists in the knotted cord of Hannibal’s pyjama trousers.  
“Then you might want to move quickly with all those fancy buttons.” 

The angles of illumination change in the wide, windowed room. Sulphurous, shifting; each strike seeking to split and divide. Doubt and self-doubt. Other people, other loyalties. Cages and distance. Different ways have been attempted, none of them successful. 

Hannibal pushes Will backwards onto their bed. 

They undress one another. Unhurriedly. Unromantically, even; it is a practical procedure, and they are both practical men.  
They are trying to be calm, and simply undo, simply untie. And yet, how unsteady, those sure hands, that have both ended and secured life. How unmoored they are, these two, that can battle seas and sink laws that some uphold as divine.

For Hannibal is trembling. And Will has no idea what to do with his glasses. Whether he should have shut the dogs away somewhere. He does not know exactly how to phrase his touches, or in what order they should be placed, to make pleasure theirs as effortlessly as pain has been.

It is simple, it is easy, to flow into a shy, lyrical friction. It could be enough, but Will has a surly determination about him, and so Hannibal forces himself to stop. 

“Do you want this?” He is no longer in control of his razor-wired heart, his crenelated mind, and he asks as coherently as he is able.  


Will leans up on his elbows. He blushes and nods, fiercely.  


Hannibal looks down. “I am sorry for it, but I may hurt you.”  


Will scrapes his fingernails across Hannibal, diagonally, from ancient scars on his shoulder to a recent momento healing on his midriff. “Considering that you probably have a broken rib, I’d say this is likely to hurt us both.”

Perhaps that is how it should be, when certain vows are made.

They shuffle about until there is some form to it; Hannibal is all pauses and grunts, gritting his teeth, fighting injury and narcotics. Will tries to be scientific, and to focus on the biology, letting out the tension in the muscle, inflating his lungs with each expansion. Their limbs are leaden and the position unpractised. 

Discomfort becomes intrusion becomes possession.

They heave around again, ungainly in their tenderness. 

And then, Hannibal is pushing, and then holding himself back, muttering, then pushing again, and all the while apologising with his best manners if not with the hard insistence of his cock. 

Sweat and saliva drips from him onto Will, and there are parts of Will that are on fire, that he is sure are burning with hell-fire, but everything Hannibal is giving him accelerates the inferno, and does nothing to douse it. 

Hannibal is inside Will.  
Hannibal is _inside_ Will.

It is unpractised, and it is intrusive, and it is the most erotic thing that Will has ever experienced.

They both work at it, panting. 

Will is being made a stranger to his own body; it is a strange thing, now, his body, conquered yet craving that which conquers, and so he twists into it, or maybe away from it, arching up, seeking the drugging fork of Hannibal's tongue against his own. 

“Fuck.” Hannibal swears as Will writhes. Puts his teeth in Will’s neck, to silence himself.  


Will opens his eyes. “Jesus Christ.”  


He lets his head fall, licking at his own skin, blindly, abruptly wanton. “Say that again.”  


Hannibal shakes his head to clear away his fringe and the encroaching delirium. Repeats the crude word and adds more, an explicit epithalamium. His praise strips down their history; desires deciphered from their deeds, the language of longing to be found in a look. He translates for Will every inference or interpretation that led him to covet, and to hope, and in hoping, to fear.  


"Oh my fucking darling," Will grimaces, "your dirty mouth." 

And it is beautiful, and now there is a poetry to it, their private poetry, that they have always had; they have used it to accuse and deceive, but now it serves a sweeter purpose, and Will finds in it a metre that he can _use_. He begins to chase a wounding, spiralling rapture. He is a great serpent, unhinging himself wide open, to take Hannibal whole. He slithers and constricts. 

And Hannibal bites again and takes back, and his whispers are wickedness, and he holds Will’s hands in his as he pierces them together, permanently, as it will be, right up until the end. 

It is a long time after that before either can speak again.  
And that is as it should be, when certain vows are made.


	7. Chapter 7

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Love is not a destination, it is a journey.

Hannibal wakes up alone. Alone in the bed, alone in the room.  
Alone in the entire world. 

Almost a day has passed since he last touched Will Graham.  
And he _aches_ with the absence; and it is a species of starvation.

Death once hollowed him like this, in the time before he was what he became, and it made of him an empty skin, a corpseless cerement, but then, he found other deaths to fill him, other flesh with which to make himself whole. 

But those completions cannot serve him now; there simply _are_ no other loves. 

Hannibal stands slowly, leaving the sharp succour of their sweat and scent behind.  
He walks. He is naked and shrouded, unsteady, perhaps, as he moves through rooms that are more numerous than before, more vast, more vacant.  
And by the sink, there are no more unwashed cups.  
And at the door, there are no scattered boots.  
No ragged scarf trails along the arm of a chair. 

Hannibal looks across to the hithe, to the familiar line of wet oak that is itself a wooden horizon between the water and the cloud, between the dun of the land and the dun of the sea, between the states of embarkation and coming home to rest, and his fists unclench.  
Will’s vessel still remains. 

But, there are crates upon the dockside.  
Hannibal closes and nails himself shut again; the goods and chattels are poised in their scattering, they clearly await a beginning.

Vakkrehejm ends beneath his feet. Hannibal finds that he has been moving forward, towards the edge. 

Perhaps he has been doing so for a long, long time.

The deepwater beats through the straits. It spills arterially against the hull of the island, against the tethered boat which strains at its ropes to be what it is, to leave behind what it cannot be.  
Hannibal bends stiffly and puts his hands into the flow.  
He cannot blame Will. He cannot blame the water.  
It is, eternally, a medium of leave-taking. 

Perhaps, that is the way of love; Hannibal does not know. 

The water promises permanence as he holds it in his palms, but even as it is so cupped, it is already scripting a silver apologia that drips through his fingers; telling him, _I have to go_.

The sea-mist slips over him, silken and saturating. As it thins and skids across the land, Sandy appears, yapping at him from the stern of Orthartja. 

Will rises from below deck. He is carrying scrolls and sheaves. Permissions and navigation charts.  
He slows when he sees Hannibal standing there, wrapped in a hand-stitched quilt, and with his hair wrecked, hands dripping saltwater, but does not actually stop in his checking and accounting.

He is detached, detaching. 

Then he says, deliberately catching Hannibal’s eye, “hello, sleepyhead.”  
And there is a gruff blushing to his voice that _burns_ , such is the concealed wonder in its warmth. Such grudging fire, Hannibal thinks, has killed him.  
He has killed _himself_ to hear it. 

Will carries on with whatever he is doing for a few minutes, while Hannibal sits down on a stack of damp boxes. 

Will is fleet of gesture; he is proficient, he is a seafarer at this point, respectful of how disrespectful oceans and weather and luck can be.  
Sandy leaps down and trots to nuzzle Hannibal’s knee. Hannibal rests his hand on a warm, yellow head.  
Will walks over. 

“I was unconscious for longer than I ought to have been. The storm has passed,” Hannibal manages, then pauses, adding, “there is another due.”  
He wants to ask Will to defer his departure.  
Another night.  
Then another. 

But he cannot; apparently, one cannot tether love, or it will cease to be what it is. 

Will shrugs in a seasoned manner, and Hannibal is, unfortunately, as captivated by Will’s competence as he is by his chipped edges and his crazing and his cracks.  
“Hmm. Got a good few hours before it hits the northern islets,” Will judges. “I’ll need to leave soon though.” 

Hannibal is wondering if he is permitted to ask where Will intends to go.  
If Hannibal is allowed to follow.  
If he will be able _not_ to follow, even if he is not allowed.

He wishes, at this moment, that he was still narcotised. 

But Will has been speaking, dredging Hannibal up from the silt.  
“…I’ll pick up us supper in Lindbakk,” Will continues, patting one pocket or another, transferring a pen from hand to hand. “Just something simple. I’ll tow the dinghy there, come back home in it as soon as I’ve squared away with the marina authorities. If everything I’ve read about Baltic winters is true, Orthartja will be berthed there ‘til spring. We should probably see about getting something of a size in between anyhow. For one thing the boys do _not_ like the look of the dinghy, and even you can’t row all four of us about _everywhere_ in the skiff. Maybe we could look for a small cruiser, but…” 

Will stops tapping his pen on a clipboard and stares at Hannibal.

“Jesus. You ok? Don’t pass out, doubt my shoulder’s up to doing that whole bridal-style thing. Go on back inside. Morphine’s tricky. Make us some tea and I’ll start bringing in my gear. I made some room in the cupboards while you were drooling all over my pillow.” He leans forward and kisses Hannibal, absently, then he goes back to scratching his stubbled head with his pen. “Some of it can go in the attic, I guess. Does that chandlery take stuff in trade?”

Hannibal blinks. 

Bold Perkunas heaves himself onto the dock and pisses over what appears to be a rucksack full of dried packet noodles. 

Will throws his paperwork down and puts his hand alongside the pale slide of Hannibal’s cheekbone.  
“Seriously. Forget the tea and get back into bed.” He grips the edges of the quilt in both hands. He swathes Hannibal awkwardly, possessively, then he kisses him again. Then again. “I’ll come settle you when I’m done.”

Hannibal nods.

And he does more or less as he is told. 

 

There is cursing. Less frequently, humming; spikes of Stravinsky planed simple by preoccupation.  
There is much crashing about.  
It is a home invasion by excited dogs and a man who would have to practise with a maestro, should he ever wish to kill silently and artistically. 

Hannibal sits on the bed. He listens to the specific orchestration of packing cases being scraped against smoothly-wallpapered panelling and painstakingly-waxed bannisters. 

It may be the finest overture Hannibal has ever heard.

Eventually, incredibly, Will Graham seems to have moved in with him.  
And he brings them up a single glass of whiskey, in the end.  
Will doesn’t explain the gesture beyond a shrug, but when offered a ceremonial mouthful, Hannibal does not demur.

Will stows a few fragments of himself here and there.  
There is not much; he has left behind what he cannot be, in order to be what he is.  
And Hannibal has already observed Will’s easy appropriation of his belongings, and while he finds it odd to share, it is odder still that he finds Will’s blatant thievery so _beguiling_. 

Finally, Will settles, only he does not. He is on the bed, on the chair, his blood is urging him to untie the ropes, to flow out across the blue, and he fidgets until Hannibal does something he tells himself is born out of irritation; he hauls Will over and practically sits him on his lap. 

“Whoa,” Will scolds. “You need to let me take the strain for a few days.”  


Then the strange, heated smile tilts his frown askew once more.  
“Uh, I don’t know if I should sleep on the couch when I get back tonight? Not that I’m suggesting that I can’t keep my hands off you or anything…But, you do need to recover, and you…last night…I mean, I…I…”

“As you wish, Will. I am used to healing alone,” Hannibal says carefully.  


He so unsure, yet so nearly joyous for what feels like the thousandth time since he shook free of his self-induced coma.

He is beginning to understand the appeal of fishing. 

The hungry longing to snatch up one’s prize, balanced against the delicious, pulling uncertainty of how much weight the line can bear. 

“Yeah, I got that loud and clear yesterday. But there’s no need now,” Will reasons, “is there?”  
“Perhaps, like Aristotle’s beasts and gods, I am not suitable for society.”  


There is a firm tug of amusement at _that_. 

“Your self-sufficiency was caused by the imperative of having to conceal murder and cannibalism, not because you didn’t want me to be at your side. I’ll even use coasters from now on, if it helps you to be less…godlike.”

Will kisses his beast yet again, swiftly, but with a message; his mouth pushes and opens Hannibal’s briefly, and Will is shy, but Will is so very certain. Hannibal hardens. Will bites, a little. 

“Actually, I lied,” he swallows. “I may be saying that I can’t keep my hands off you. But, you are hurt.” Will’s voice goes low. “So, let me learn. Surrender yourself directly to _me_ , this time. No more proxies. You, and me, until the end.”

Hannibal cannot breathe, but must protest. “I have had worse injuries than a rib…”

“I’m not talking about a rib.” Will interrupts, quickly and seriously, and Hannibal himself is caught.  
Will leans back enough so that Hannibal cannot unhook himself with more kisses. “I don’t mean scrapes and bruises received on whatever cockamamie mission Chiyoh dragged you into. I’m talking about this.” 

Will puts his fingertips against Hannibal’s body. Professional. Examining. 

“I am familiar with stitching used after an operation. And those drugs you have over there, hiding at the back of the cabinet? The combination is quite specific. I looked up the private clinic that prescribed them to Eirik Buckley. It specialises in oncology.” 

Hannibal slides his hand up the side of Will’s face. Until he touches a scar too. Their arms net one another; they are enmeshed by pain inflicted, pain revealed, pain endured.  
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here, Hannibal.” Will dips his head. “And I’m not asking you to talk about it all, not right now. But the prognosis. You have to tell me. Just tell me that. Now. Please.” 

In truth, Hannibal has shared pain before.  
But not in this way.  
And not his own pain.  
He wonders if borrowing and lending like _this_ , to Will, from Will, can be as profound as their exchanges of sensation have been, can be as satisfying as the simple loan of a sweater on a cold morning.

“The procedure was a success,” Hannibal states, clearly. “One further surgery may be required,” he clarifies. “The disease is, as they say, eminently treatable, given my prompt self-diagnosis.”

And Will gradually looks up and smiles, from a dark, heavenly place. It could be the best, the most honest smile Will has ever allowed himself. 

And his arms tighten around Hannibal, so that they will never fall again, and he says, “yes. Of course. Yes.”

 

Hannibal is standing on their latticed veranda. His skin has been bitten to bruises, but _hurriedly_.  
Will has been rough with him, his is tenderness without pity, which is the way with monsters.

Will’s own scarf has been forcibly retired, and he is wearing a slippery, silken nonsense that he has not stopped grumbling about since Hannibal captured him with it. 

Will is less restless, now that he is nearly done with his solitary journeying. There is this to do, then they can bed down, claw in claw, safely laired, for the slow, still, coming months.

“Orthartja.” Hannibal comments, glancing out at the boat, whinnying and weaving at the quayside. “The ship of the gods. Whoever sailed in her was taken straight to their heart’s desire.”

Will picks up Hannibal’s book of old Norse legends that will now, no doubt, have to be sent away for costly repairs. He sees the longboat Orthartja, riding a torn page, with a stretching, legless lizard, illustrated in gold, at her prow.  
“This even worthy of salvage, after you were so goddamn careless with it?”

How many other, once-inviolable things will they yet break, cheerfully, solemnly, contentedly, together? 

Hannibal pretends to be displeased at the question, while removing the black and red from around Will’s neck. He kisses the skin there, hard, until the blood comes to the surface and Will hisses at him, hands finding and grasping at Hannibal’s hips in return. 

Will is wondering if he can shave any time at all off his trip to Lindbakk.

Hannibal replaces his favourite scarf around his favourite throat, and smiles slightly. “I may keep it in its current state of ruin. Imperfection seems fitting, for a book full of monsters and broken heroes.”  
Will nods, righting his glasses. “Yeah. Could you read me one of the stories? Tonight? Unless we’re going with the couch idea?”  
“You will be in our bed.” Hannibal threatens, pushing Will away, pushing him down the steps, towards Orthartja, who will surely bring him home again, please the gods, and swiftly. “From this night on.” 

Will wonders if he can shave a _lot_ of time off his trip to Lindbakk.

He is walking backwards now, unable to look away, unable to believe that he is finally where he should be.  
That he is finally _what_ he should be.

“Maybe I could fix the binding up a little,” Will offers, “got some glue in the workshop.” He puts his hands in his pockets, otherwise he might do something foolish with them. “Maybe we’ll need to make sure it stays in one piece? After all, it’s a manual for how monsters should live.”

But Hannibal shakes his head. “We can create our own history, Will. One which is eternal, and enduring.”  
And his eyes are growing sharp again. As are his teeth. His appetites.

And Will nods, and waves, foolishly, until he is out of sight, knowing that nothing endures, or is eternal, that is not first written in blood.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for sticking with this, onwards now to Tomorrow was our Golden Age. Hopefully this last chapter sort of works as an ending and a beginning. Anyway Thank you for reading. Hope you enjoyed it. ZZ. Xxxxxxxxxxxxxx


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